Sparkle Calibre P980 (9800 GT) Review - PAGE 3

Box and bundle

Generally video cards come in boxes with typical garish art, such as drawings of large breasted women or robots, but the Sparkle Calibre P980 comes in a more classic styled, large, dark cardboard box with a silver horse on the front. The model number is identifiable by a tag that hangs from the top, and the side panels of the box. 

The back of the box relates that the Sparkle card comes with a three year warranty, and that the packaging was made from recycled materials.

As for the bundle, this video card comes with a driver CD, a paper quick-start manual, composite video cables, a molex-to-PCIE power adapter cable, and a DVI-VGA adapter. Fairly standard bundle -- though a SLI bridge would be nice to see. 

Overclocking

The Calibre P980 already has a significant overclock, but now, knowing what the 9800 GT is usually capable of, we felt confident pushing this video card even further.

The cooler proved effective in our overclocking efforts. As per our usual operating procedure, we manually set the fan to run at 100% for our overclocking limits test. Usually, you would not to run a fan at 100% all the time -- it would be too noisy. However here this wasn't the case, with Sparkle's cooler. Although it was by no means quiet, we felt that the noise generated even when the fan was running at 100% wasn't distractingly loud -- some of you who are looking for the absolute highest amount of performance you can get out of this card might want to keep it running at 100%, to improve your overclocking attempts. 

After a lot of experimenting, we found our upper limits (keep in mind: limits will vary card to card) to be 772 / 1912 / 1123 ( core clock / shader clock / memory clock [in MHz]) for this P980 -- which is well over the default clocks of the 9800 GT (600 / 1500 / 900), making the Sparkle Calibre P980 a stronger-than-average overclocker.